Five ultra low voltage Ivy Bridge parts in the works

Earlier this week it emerged that Intel is working on a series of power efficient Ivy Bridge chips, with TDP’s well south of 17W. Now the first specs are out and we are looking at five dual-core parts, including a single Core i3, two Core i5 parts, a Core i7 chip and even a single Pentium.

Although there was talk of 10W and 13W parts, it turns out only the Pentium 2129Y fits the 10W envelope. It’s a 1.1GHz dual-core, sans Hyperthreading and Turbo. It has 2MB of cache and an 850MHz GPU. The Core i3-3229Y also lacks Turbo, but it’s clocked at 1.4 and has four threads. It’s got a nominal TDP of 13W, HD 4000 graphics and 3MB of L3 cache.

Moving on Core i5 parts, Intel will offer the Core i5 3339Y and 3439Y, both stock clocked at 1.5GHz, with 3MB of cache and 13W TDP. However, the 3339Y will go up to 2GHz on Turbo, while the 3439Y can hit 2.3GHz. Pretty impressive for a 13W part, but the Core i7 3689Y takes it one step further. It’s clocked at 1.5GHz, but on Turbo it can run at 2.6GHz. It has 4MB of cache, and like the other parts, it also features HD 4000 graphics clocked at up to 850MHz.

However, here’s a twist. All five chips support cTDP Down mode, that lets manufacturers limit the TDP to just 10 watts. Furthermore, they can all be made to fit an even lower thermal envelope – just 7 watts. Of course, bringing 13W parts down to just 7W will degrade performance, but at least it’s possible.